Ever heard the maxim “smart characters are only as smart as their author”? Initially a legit piece of writing advice, it’s mostly used as a dig at shitty writing nowadays.
If not, you’ve probably noticed it in effect—a supposed genius character suddenly starts making seemingly stupid decisions. Those decisions tend to fall into three categories:
- To arbitrarily manufacture conflict.
- To demonstrate near omniscience via things perfectly working out.
- To forcibly get out of a plot corner the author wrote themselves into.
It sucks when it happens, because your suspension of disbelief starts doing the writing’s share of heavy lifting. It’s one of the more obvious ways characterization can fail.
Like many writing wisdoms and failures, this one overlaps quite a bit with translation. Just as an author can’t convincingly write a character whose range they can’t convincingly imagine or inhabit, it follows that neither can a translator.
Try as they might, they’ll be hopelessly outmatched. My personal Achilles heel is millennial writing. You know exactly the kind.
The quip till you croak variety of postmodern media banter popularized by Marvel’s MCU. I don’t have it in me to stomach the psychic damage sustained from working with it anymore.
Luckily, I mostly work on indies nowadays, so it’s not something I worry about as often as I did back when I was freelancing on AAAs where it thoroughly plagued their writing. And if it does land on my plate again, I’ll let someone better suited handle it.
I’ve always been a creative heretic—a firm believer in the supremacy of natural talent over hard work in creative endeavors. The “You either have it or you don’t” type. I try to make that fact very clear to our collaborators from the get-go.
We ask for their preferences, evaluate how they deal with different kinds of writing in our test, and try to match them with what we think they’d excel at until something sticks. If nothing does, welp, it’s unfortunately just not going to work out.
Spend enough time doing that, and you’re bound to notice peers trying to fight the hand they’re dealt. Struggling to fit their squares into circles.
Usually, it’s either to project an image of a jack of all trades or get to work on their favorite genres, to varying results—mostly, frankly, miserable ones.
Because it’s just not going to happen.
Hard work will definitely get you far, but the potential to clear that last stretch will always depend on the dice you never personally rolled. Your personality, experiences, and style.
Sure, you can dedicate yourself to being passable at emulating voices you’re incompatible with, but your best imitation will always be the average natural’s worst.
Rendering a voice you fundamentally can’t inhabit is a fool’s errand. Readers tend to immediately pick up on that, let alone the peers evaluating you. And nobody is scrambling to pick the garden variety.
Instead of trying to tick all the boxes, focus on the ones that set you apart.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.